The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year's BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.

Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.

Judge Batts ruled that Prince’s appropriation of Cariou’s work failed to meet standards of fair use on four specific grounds, which comprised a perhaps unintended esthetic critique of Prince’s overall artistic practice. She noted that Prince had used Cariou’s photographs in toto with minimal alterations, adding that Prince had testified that his work had no specific meaning (crucial to a narrow definition of "fair use" as commentary). The judge also charged Prince and his studio with acting in "bad faith" by requesting copies of Cariou’s book from the photographer’s studio without specifying the intended artistic use and never negotiating any kind of rights agreements with Cariou.

Now, anyone who knows Prince’s work knows that minimal yet overall appropriation in the service of bad faith is what his work and career are all about, yet the judge rejected this meta kind of appropriation, ruling that it did not fall within the definition of fair use. Indeed, Judge Batts implied a kind of slippery slope by observing that Prince had not cut up or sectioned Cariou’s pictures sufficiently, making an observer wonder whether a Mimmo Rotella standard of radical pictorial transformation would be the minimum standard for fair use.

Either way, having a judge as an interpreter of the meaning of art remains Kafkaesque: we can trot out the entire oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and a thousand other artists as violators of Judge Batts’ standard. But what of photographer Cariou? Is he not an artist, as well? There is undeniable schadenfreude in seeing Prince suffer, notably when his “Canal Zone” show was one of his laziest (but wasn’t that the point?) and a best seller at high retail price points. Indeed, Judge Batts decreed that, absent a stay for an appeal from the defendants, Prince’s work from the series and the tools used to make it should be obliterated in some way in the next 10 days, with those paintings already sold forbidden from being (literally) hung on the walls. Presumably, Cariou will have

Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it’s a good idea.

One intuition motivating this series of talks has been the feeling that there is something deeply problematic about an approach that narrows the possibilities of engaging with art down to the procedures of decoding and encoding its inscription onto the symbolic order. That is: the idea that the primary task of art, as a strategical operation, was to provide conceptual legitimations (to satisfy or lay down the law, among other things) by constructing references that situate the work within an established economy of meaning. No matter how critical this approach may intially have intended to be, it has effectively proven to be coextensive with—and an involuntary ideological support of—an attitude towards art production that is indeed merely strategical and solely about plotting ways of inscribing a practice into the symbolic order, be it through the suicidal heroic mode of bringing the game of art to its logical conclusion by explicating its rules (old-school modernist conceptual) or through the somewhat more versatile mode of implicating a work within its given economies of referentiality as rarified secrets.